by Noam Chomsky
Focusing now more closely on RR strategy for investigating language, proceed by assuming that the language faculty is a modular internal system that operates in a determinate way, where that way is fixed as a result of principles of organic growth; the system is, then, innate and because it operates when mature in determinate ways and develops in accordance within fixed constraints on growth, it is possible to construct a theory of it. That theory aims to describe and explain the internal operations of the faculty, assuming these to be procedures for taking the various kinds of ‘information’ available in lexical items stored in a person’s mental dictionary and, by a procedure that joins lexical items and the information that they contain to one another, yields a sentential expression. A sentential expression consists of a sound and a meaning; it can be thought of as a paired form of information: sound information and meaning information. Each kind of information appears in forms that can be ‘read’ (‘understood’) by the relevant kinds of other internal systems at two interfaces, the sound interface (PHON(etic interface)) and the meaning interface (SEM(antic interface)). The sound information is used by perceptual and articulatory systems to yield compressions varying in frequency and amplitude in air (or – as with thought – it stays ‘inside’) or to ‘decode’ these signals received at the ear; the meaning information is used by “conceptual and intentional” systems to do – after the contributions of these others systems – with this information what a person wants, perhaps to ask someone a question or to try to figure out why her watch doesn’t work. An internalist theory of linguistic meaning focuses not on how the semantic information in lexical items is ‘read’ by other systems in the head, but rather on (1) describing in theoretical terms the relevant kinds of information available in lexical items and (2) saying how it got there (answering Plato’s Problem – the acquisition problem – for lexical sounds and meanings). For children acquire ‘words’ very quickly indeed, offering in doing so large numbers of poverty-of-the-stimulus observations. Given the rate at which they are acquired – about one a waking hour between age two and eight – the specific characters of lexical ‘sound’ information, and the intricacy of lexical meanings (intricate beyond anything described in the most detailed dictionary), we must assume some kind of internal mechanisms. Perhaps the most challenging one is the mechanism that assembles lexical ‘meanings’ – i.e., relevant kinds of semantic information. When that mechanism is specified, it will constitute an important part of an answer to Plato’s Problem for lexical acquisition. Then, (3) we must say how the semantic information in lexical items is composed by syntactic principles (syntax yields a theory of compositionality), and (4) indicate what is provided at the semantic interface to other systems, including modifications, if any, due to composition. All of this must be done, furthermore, while meeting standard conditions on naturalistic scientific research, outlined below. Accomplishing all of these tasks is very difficult, but there has been some progress. At least it is clearer now than it was fifty years ago how syntax contributes, and how to construe the overall contributions of language at the relevant interfaces to the rest of the mind. There has also been at least some progress made in investigating semantic features. But a lot remains to be done. Nothing looks to be impossible, though, as does a naturalistic theory of reference or a socially determinate account of use.
Informally, one can think of the semantic information provided in a lexical item as a lexical concept, and of the semantic information combined at the semantic interface as a sentential concept. This captures the idea that concepts are the internal tools we humans use to – as above – ask someone a question or speculate about why one’s watch does not work (and what to do about it). Internal conceptual tools are what we use to categorize, to think, to speculate, and so on. An internalist linguistic theory of meaning details the contributions of the language faculty to a person’s conceptual tools. That contribution, it seems, is substantial. And there is little doubt that syntax allows us to be as flexible in our cognitive exercises as we seem to be. A great deal more could be said, but this will suffice for this introduction. An internalist theory of linguistic meaning can go a long way towards making sense of why we think of our words and sentences as “meaningful.” They are meaningful because they offer us the tools to do what we do.
But if semantic relationships to the outside world do not figure in internalist theories of language and their meanings, surely the outside world – its things and events, its social institutions and the practices of people – must figure in the RR picture of the mind and its study in some way? The world outside the head does figure, but in ways that do not challenge the RR assumptions and the internalist research strategy they base on them. First, as mentioned before, the audible and visible ‘externalized’ ways people use concepts to think and act – to categorize, describe, assess, complain, convince, etc. – provide some evidence for and against theories of the internal mechanisms. But, they point out, a theory does not consist of its evidence. Operationalism and instrumentalism, epistemological versions of behaviorism, and so on, are not theories; they are empiricist-motivated (and very poor) methodological recommendations. A mental theory is a theory of an internal system – its algorithms or rules of operation, its inputs and outputs, and the means by which it comes to have these rules, etc.
Second, the outside world is no doubt the source of some of the input or data – the ‘experience’ – needed for the language system/organ to begin to develop, and continue development to reach a steady state (vocabulary additions and subtractions aside). Just as vision does not develop normally if it is not given the ‘right’ kinds of input during critical stages of development, so concepts and their combinatory mechanisms do not develop in the child unless they receive at least some external input of the ‘right’ kind. In the case of language, the child does not develop language normally unless his or her mind is provided with at least some linguistic input that has the form of one natural language or another. The input required is, however, remarkably small – not in absolute scale, but relative to the specificity of what is acquired – and the input may be corrupt. Development is robust; it seems to be “channeled.” And, it is important to recognize, with neither concepts nor combinatory principles does the shape or character of what is activated result from the input. Perhaps the need for a concept arises as a result of prompting or stimulation from the outside world, but the shape and character of a concept or combinatory system is determined by the mind itself, not the world or community. Indeed, the mind’s developmental operations ‘say’ what kinds of data are needed. Generally, internal developmental mechanisms – not the external world or a person’s community – specify the kinds of causes or external prompts/patterns required for activation and maturation.14
Given such beliefs about the mind and its study, the RR advocate is likely to maintain – as suggested above – that the view of the world that one gets through the lens of our innate concepts and combinatory principles owes more to the characters of our concepts and combinatory principles than it does to how the world might be ‘in itself’. To put a label on this kind of view, I will call it (a form of) constructivism: our minds ‘make’ the world, rather than the other way around. I mention it here to underscore the difference between the RR camp and the empiricist one. For empiricists believe that in the case of most concepts (perhaps not ‘pure’ sensory ones) and combinatory principles, the world shapes the mind.
The RRs’ opponents, the empiricists, hold that most of the concepts expressed in natural languages (DOG, HOUSE, WASH. . .) and the combinatory principles that place them in understandable sentences are not innate, but rather learned. Perhaps they are assemblies of perceptual ‘features’ (Locke, Prinz (2002)), specific kinds of roles constituted by the ‘moves’ (inferences) people engage in when exercising social practices, ‘connection weights’ in neural nets, and so on. However construed, concepts and “rules” are learned by engaging some kind of generalized learning procedure (hypothesi
s formation and testing, association, training procedures, behaviorist conditioning. . .) that after repetition and ‘feedback’ in the form of positive and negative ‘evidence’ comes to converge on what society, the experimenter, ‘the world’, or some other assumed judge of meeting a criterion accepts. However construed, the empiricist believes that the environment, including society, makes and shapes concepts and the principles (“rules”) of their combination through some sort of generalized learning procedure, a procedure that usually involves not just (a lot of) sensory or other low-level input and/or data, but a trial-and-error procedure of some sort, where error is corrected by some kind of ‘negative evidence’ [“that’s not right;” pain/punishment on a behaviorist version of empiricism], perhaps provided by parents or instructors, perhaps even (it is claimed) by the lack of data. Because the empiricist holds that such procedures are sufficient to learn the thousands of concepts that four-year-olds have available, and to learn the combinatory principles and structural constraints of a local language, the empiricists must assume that much of the child’s early life and use of language is devoted to focused data-gathering and training sessions that consist in getting the child to conform to the “speech habits,” ‘proper’ (epistemically appropriate, etc.) applications, or uses of concepts the child’s trainers want it to exhibit. For otherwise one would find – contrary to fact – children acquiring language and many thousands of concepts at very different times (depending on training, the resources of trainers, native intelligence, interest and devotion to duty. . .), going through very different stages of development, and so on. However the story is told, empiricists are anti-nativist and externalist: they maintain that concepts such as those mentioned above and the combinatory principles or “rules” that languages offer to produce complexes of concepts (what sentences express) are ‘learned’ by experience of things and events ‘outside’. Because of this, they must hold that study of the contents of the mind cannot be divorced from the environment(s) in which the mind is situated, where an environment includes for language crucially the linguistic behaviors (presumably respecting the linguistic practices) of a “community.” In at least this sense, the empiricist is committed to an externalist program.
There is a massive amount of question-begging here. What, exactly, is a generalized learning procedure? How are hypotheses concerning the applications of concepts formed if one does not have the concepts in the first place? What counts as similar, what dissimilar? How, specifically, does analogy work in trying to extend acquired knowledge to unacquired? Where does linguistic structure come from? What counts as sufficient to show that child N has acquired any or all concepts {c1. . .cn}, or rules {R1. . .Rn}? Where are all the trainers the learning procedure requires, and even assuming that there are some, where do they find the time? Why do children at a particular stage of development completely ignore – virtually not hear – their parents’ admonitions to say “went,” not “goed?” What about the fact that our concepts have little to do with what is really out there? Why does only the human mind seem to acquire language in the normal way? Why do intelligent apes fail to acquire a language like any human sign language, no matter how much they are trained? Where do the hierarchies found in natural language clausal constructions come from? Why do languages appear only in certain forms? How does a child manage to develop the notion of a phoneme? And so on, and on. Chomsky has noted many of these gaps, and others, in empiricist views since at least 1957 with Syntactic Structures (and before that, Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, although it was not published until later) and 1959 with his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Some of his criticisms reappear in CL in what he has to say about “modern linguistics.” A few are highlighted below.
There is another problem, related but less noted. On the face of it, the empiricist has a difficult time accounting for early creativity. Given the enormous amount the child must be assumed to have acquired in order to display what is in fact observed to be in their repertoires (thousands of concepts, sounds, and the combinatory principles of a language) in order to gain the kind of “mastery” of concepts and the ways that they can be combined needed for everyday linguistic creativity, and given the enormous amount of time surely needed to get what a community insists is “the right way to speak” (and classify, describe, explain, speculate. . .) out of a “generalized learning mechanism,” it is hard to explain what seems to be effortless creative use of language on the parts of all normal three-and-a-half or four-year-old children. And it becomes extremely difficult to understand how all children manage to be creative in the ‘ordinary’ way at about the same time; surely intensity of training, differences in native intelligence, parental resources, and different varieties of experiences would all lead to different rates at which a child learns to “master” what is needed. Ordinary creativity seems to pose a serious challenge to the empiricist camp’s assumptions about the nature of mind and their research strategy.
As my remarks so far emphasize, the choice between RR and empiricist assumptions about the mind and scientific research strategies turn on a rather simple set of observations that anyone can make concerning linguistic creativity (particularly with children), and another set concerning rate and timing of learning/activation, and the kind(s) and amount of input received. RR approaches to mind and language seem to respect these simple observations, and take their task to be explaining them or – where scientific explanation is impossible, as with creativity – to seek to show how what is in the mind makes the phenomenon possible. To the extent that empiricist approaches do not take these observations and the tasks they set for the science of mind seriously, they seem to be ignoring facts that stare them in the face. Empiricist strategy for the study of mind does not seem to be responsible to empirical facts.